Pete Farina Technology Director Montini Catholic High School pfarina@montini.org
Scratch is a graphical programming language designed by researchers at M.I.T.’s Media Lab. Scratch’s aim is to make programming accessible and fun for kids. It’s simple enough for a 1st grader and sophisticated enough to keep high school seniors engaged and challenged. It has a visual lego-block interface that, while colorful and easy to use, teaches core computational ideas and programming concepts that apply to real-world programming languages.
Scratch is a free down-loadable program that runs on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. It’s also a community of users, developers, and educators linked together by the Scratch web site. Once you make a free Scratch account, you have access to galleries of user-created projects that you can download, resources for educators and students, and support in forums.
All of the resources needed to learn and teach with Scratch can be found here: Scratch main web site **http://scratch.mit.edu/**
ZIP file of several PDF "Scratch Cards" that are quick visual aids for learning basic Scratch functions (suitable for students of any age) ScratchCardsAll-v1.4-PDF.zip
The video game masterpiece that you created at the Tech Fest: "Bubble Pong" (You need Scratch installed on your computer to be able to view/play/edit this file) Bubble Pong.sb
Finally, a PDF of the handout that I passed out at the Tech Fest that will help you re-create "Bubble Pong" Tech Fest 2012 handout.pdf
Learning with Scratch
Pete Farina
Technology Director
Montini Catholic High School
pfarina@montini.org
Scratch is a graphical programming language designed by researchers at M.I.T.’s Media Lab. Scratch’s aim is to make programming accessible and fun for kids. It’s simple enough for a 1st grader and sophisticated enough to keep high school seniors engaged and challenged. It has a visual lego-block interface that, while colorful and easy to use, teaches core computational ideas and programming concepts that apply to real-world programming languages.
Scratch is a free down-loadable program that runs on Windows, Mac OS, and Linux. It’s also a community of users, developers, and educators linked together by the Scratch web site. Once you make a free Scratch account, you have access to galleries of user-created projects that you can download, resources for educators and students, and support in forums.
All of the resources needed to learn and teach with Scratch can be found here:
Scratch main web site
**http://scratch.mit.edu/**
ScratchED: an online community for educators who use Scratch
**http://scratched.media.mit.edu/**
Scratch Forums: community of users/developers
**http://scratch.mit.edu/forums/**
Here are copies of all the files I used at Tech Fest 2012:
Complete Reference Manual for Scratch
ScratchReferenceGuide14.pdf
Brief Getting Started Guide to Scratch (suitable for students)
ScratchGettingStartedv14.pdf
ZIP file of several PDF "Scratch Cards" that are quick visual aids for learning basic Scratch functions (suitable for students of any age)
ScratchCardsAll-v1.4-PDF.zip
Two PDF's that answer the questions "Why Scratch?" and "Why use Scratch in my non-computer class?"
Learning with Scratch.pdf
Programming-with-Scratch.pdf
73 page Curriculum Guide for Using Scratch at the Elementary Level (It's an ongoing project over at the ScratchED site)
CurriculumGuide-v20110923.pdf
The video game masterpiece that you created at the Tech Fest: "Bubble Pong" (You need Scratch installed on your computer to be able to view/play/edit this file)
Bubble Pong.sb
Finally, a PDF of the handout that I passed out at the Tech Fest that will help you re-create "Bubble Pong"
Tech Fest 2012 handout.pdf